Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GAMER (Game changer in high temperature steam electrolysers with novel tubular cells and stacks geometry for pressurized hydrogen production)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2022-01-01 do 2022-09-30
The consortium covers the full value chain of the hydrogen economy, from cell and SEU manufacturer (CMS), system integrators (MC2, CRI), through researchers (SINTEF, UiO, CSIC), to end users in refineries, oil and gas, chemical industry (CRI, SGSI, with advisory board members YARA and AirLiquide). All along the project, these experienced partners will pay particular attention to risk management (technical, economic, logistic, business) and ensure progress of the technology from TRL3 to TRL5. The overall consortium will perform strategic communication with relevant stakeholders in order to ensure strong exploitation of the project’s results.
GAMER focused on the demonstration of an innovative, low cost and modular hydrogen production technology utilising tubular proton conducting ceramic cells and their inherent advantages for steam electrolysis:
Scalability and modularity of the electrolyser system: the electrolyser is designed for scale (small, medium, large);
Lower operating temperature (600°C) than SOE reducing degradation associated to cation diffusion, and enabling use of lower cost steel for pressure vessel;
Production of pure dry hydrogen at the anode side, preventing risk of oxidation encountered in SOE;
Increased safety: In PCE, any increase in pH2O increases the pH2. In contrast, the SOE must have a high pO2 alone at one electrode to balance the pH2O+pH2 at the opposite electrode. Pure hot high pressure O2 is risky;
Increased robustness of tubular cells, in particular, when exposed to pressure differentials compared to planar cells;
Reduced sealing area compared to planar cells.
The project has developed an innovative stack design to integrate the SEU in a hot-box. Each rack is dimensioned to connect 16 SEUs (fig. 6) enabling high compactness of SEUs assembly and monitoring of each rack. The testing rig has necessary BoP and hot-box built by MC2 - fig. 4,5. Two racks built by MC2 were tested at atmospheric pressure, 3 barg and 7 barg, obtaining a maximum H2 production of 0.46 NL/min at 600 °C, At atmospheric pressure, a H2 production of 0.47 NL/min and a Faradaic efficiency of 61% were reached by applying a current of 100 A. A stability test of 100 hours was performed and a decrease of the H2 production was observed although the i-v curves before and after testing are similar - fig 7. Further continuation of these efforts and exploitation of these results will be undertaken in the next European Project granted in Jan. 2023.